In the field of this invention it is known that many speaker phones and mobile phone car installations suppress the microphone while sound is being played out in order to eliminate echo and feedback. According to conventional teachings, the microphone remains in an off state until a relatively high volume audio signal is received. This microphone enablement technique causes the microphone to remain in an off state when a user speaks in a low to medium volume. Because the speaker phone or mobile kit does not react until after a high energy audio signal is received, any low level sounds at the start of the utterance can be lost. Accordingly, the system only receives a truncated part of the utterance resulting in a speech recognition of the utterance being unsuccessful.
This approach has the disadvantage that the spoken phrase is highly likely to be rejected outright or possibly confused with other candidate phrases. A need therefore exists for method of increasing speech recognition performance in such systems wherein the abovementioned disadvantage(s) may be alleviated.